March 5, 2014

There are lots of tutorials on how to get things rolling. This post deals with the specific issue of DNS services made available through the VPN.

Most of my users connect to our VPN using Windows clients, which is great because OpenVPN’s Windows client has the ability to override the existing DNS services that the client is using and replace them with DNS services pushed by the VPN server. This means that the users have access to all of our internal network using the same names as if they were connected locally. Just what you would expect.

Under Linux this is a bit more complicated because Linux (and most of the *nix world) uses the /etc/resolv.conf file to resolve name information and the Linux Openvpn client doesn’t change the information stored thereon it’s own. This makes things painful if Linux users don’t have access to the internal DNS.

The Openvpn solution is to use the openvpn scripting feature to pass the information to a script which will process it. After a few false starts with other people’s scripts I came up with the following configuration. OpenVPN will provide warnings in syslog that scripting is enabled because almost anything can be done with scripts, even very bad things.

October 30, 2011

Update Nov 14 2011: I’ve uploaded 32-bit packages for testing as well. Please have at it and let me know what the issues are. The repository file is the same for all versions. Qt-Creator packages are building for both architectures overnight, so if all goes well I will upload them in the morning.

I’ve finished the first compile of Qt 4.7.4 packages for RHEL/Centos 6.0. There are several things to consider before using these packages.

Unlike RHEL/Centos 5, Qt 4 is a primary system package upon which rests a host of system applications, most notably KDE. For this first round of packages, I took the system package spec file and updated it with the 4.7.4 sources. There are quite a few patches in the system sources, and I kept all of them that didn’t cause a portion of the build process to break. Anything that broke the process was simply commented out, which is a lazy way of doing things. In actuality, each one should be analyzed and re-patched to the new source if necessary. Time constraints dictate that I’m a bit lazy on this for now, so these packages should be rigorously tested before pushed to a production system. Also, the new system packages use an Epoch, which means that the version numbers are meaningless in terms of which packages Yum will install. To get around this, I bumped the Epoch from 1 to 1000, and I’ll continue to increment it as I push new packages. This should provide that the freivald.com packages are always selected over other repositories.

I plan to push these to a fresh VM in a day or two and, if all goes well, build and push Qt-Creator.

Feel free to test these packages, but be aware that they are for test purposes only at this point. Please provide feedback on the success or failure of your testing.

The repository file (which is the same as the v5 file) is located here.

September 23, 2011

Qt packages are released for Centos and RHEL Version 5.7, i386 and x86_64 architectures.

With this release comes a new repository structure. The old /centos tree will disappear except for the new software.freivald.com repository file update, which point to the new repository. The new files are found only at http://software.freivald.com/el. The upgrade should be seamless, but will require one ‘yum update’ to grab the new repository files, and another ‘yum update’ to grab the updated files out of the new repository.

If you use priorities, which you should if you have more than one additional repository, be certain to un-comment the priority lines in /etc/yum.repos.d/software.freivald.com.repo.

Please let me know of any problems with the update, particularly on x86_64. I have changed the way the qt-creator libraries are linked because the qt-creator source always puts the libs in /usr/lib/qtcreator, even when they should be in /usr/lib64/qtcreator.

November 17, 2010

Sorry for the delay in getting 4.7.1 out. I’m jammed up at work. I hope to get it out in the next week or so.

When Centos 6 is released I’ll be building Qt packages and ALIX images for it but I will not be abandoning el5 until it is EOL. Lord thank you for Virtual Machines!

I will also be re-configuring the repositories to make them non-centos specific. I’ll be using ‘qt-el’ instead of ‘centos’ to eliminate confusion for RHEL users who have never heard of Centos. The update will involve moving the RPM packages to a new directory structure and updating the repository package. The old /centos directories will have only the updated repository package in it, so when a ‘yum upgrade’ is performed on an existing machine the new package will redirect the machine to the new directory structure. A second ‘yum update’ will then upgrade the packages normally.

With any luck it will be entirely seamless to the community.

On a side note, we’re over 200 registered users, over 700,000 non-bot hits per month (over 670k from Yum and wget alone!), and easily keeping over 50GB of transfer per month, with a peak in October of over 110GB. We’re #1 on Google’s search with “Qt Centos” and “ALIX Centos” and several others. We have users in Russia, Germany, Italy, France, India, South Africa, the U.S., and dozens more, with hits coming from .com, .edu, .org and several other top-level domains.

October 4, 2010

I’ve updated the x86_64 and i386 repositories to Qt 4.7.0 and qt-creator 2.0.1.

UPDATE [6 OCT, 11:34]: This morning I finally added Yum groups to the repository, so all you have to do for the base library is (as root):yum groupinstall Qt4
and for the development environment:yum groupinstall Qt4-Devel
The mysql and postgresql packages do not install by default because they pull a bunch of extra libraries if you don’t have the databases already installed, so you might also want to include:yum install qt4-postgresql qt4-mysql

If you are doing any application debugging you may want to install qt4-debuginfo as well:yum install --enablerepo software.freivald.com-debuginfo qt4-debuginfo

NOTE: I’ve changed the 32 bit packages to be optimized for i686, which might register conflicts against the old i386 packages. If that happens, uninstall the conflicting i386 packages using ‘rpm -e –nodeps ‘, which will keep dependencies from preventing the uninstall. Then install the new packages as normal.

If this causes too much headache then I can create a separate repository for each. Let me know.

These packges were created on Centos 5.5 but should be completely compatible with RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5.